Student-Developed ‘FishSense’ Project Collects Data With One Click

Article Content

This article originally appeared in the fall 2024 issue of UC San Diego Magazine as “Exploring the Oceans, One Fish at a Time.”

The Jacobs School of Engineering’s Engineers for Exploration program offers students the opportunity to tackle real-world problems without simple or predefined solutions.

In this program, students develop and use technology to drive the future of exploration. Teams of students work both in the U.S. and abroad with a wide range of partners on hands-on, multidisciplinary projects centered around the broad goals of protecting the environment, uncovering mysteries related to cultural heritage and providing experiential learning experiences for undergraduate and graduate students. 

FishSense, a project-based team that is developing a suite of tools to gauge the size and health of fish populations, is one such effort from Engineers for Exploration.

Currently, researchers and citizen scientists bring along a ruler as they dive below the surface and use it to guesstimate the length of fish they spot. Or fish are caught, measured onboard a boat and released back into the ocean. 

The FishSense project is making these tasks easier and more accurate. Students have developed an underwater camera with a lidar laser attachment that divers can now use to snap photos of fish they encounter. Data from the photo is then run through the FishSense software to automatically generate an accurate length measurement. Fish generally get larger as they age, and older, bigger fish have more offspring, so keeping tabs on the size of fish provides scientists and fisheries managers with a crucial peek into the health of different species. 

The FishSense project is a collaboration between Engineers for Exploration and Professor Brice Semmens and the Semmens Lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. 

To bring the FishSense technology to the citizen science community, the FishSense team partnered with the Reef Environmental Education Foundation international nonprofit, which runs the world’s largest scuba diving citizen science program.

This summer, Chris Crutchfield ’18, MS ’23, a PhD student in electrical engineering, and a team of undergraduate students from the Research Experience for Undergraduates and the International Summer Research programs tested a new tool they’re developing for shipboard catch-and-release fish monitoring. 

“We developed technologies to produce accurate fish measurements with iPhones and iPads on board vessels out in the middle of the ocean,” says Crutchfield. “Using lidar tech that is built into these devices, we can do automatic length detection from a photo of the fish using the FishSense app. This would keep the fish out of water for less time and reduce the overall impact of the catch-and-release process on the fish while providing more accurate measurements.”

As part of this effort, the Engineers for Exploration students participated in several California Collaborative Fisheries Research Program cruises to help marine biologists use this new FishSense tool as they work to assess the effectiveness of marine protected areas and other no-fishing zones. 

The FishSense team is hoping to incorporate some of the Semmens Lab’s “face ID for fish” tools into the FishSense software. The goal is to one day be able to detect the fish species — and even uniquely identify a specific fish — all from one photo. Being able to know how often you spot a specific fish could limit the need to tag fish for tracking and would help make population size estimates more accurate.